Can You Get Pregnant While Breastfeeding?

This is one doubt that a lot many breastfeeding mothers have, and the plainest and simplest answer to this question is that breastfeeding is no guaranteed way of birth control.

However we’re not saying that this strategy doesn’t work at all. Breast feeding alone is no guarantee that you are not fertile, so read through to find out how breastfeeding can help prevent getting pregnant. Breastfeeding can work as a natural contraceptive if an only if the following three conditions hold true.

1. The first thing to note is that your baby must be completely on breastfeed, if you want breastfeeding to work as a contraceptive. The baby must be exclusively breastfed and no formula milk or pacifiers must be used.

2. The breastfeeding baby should be no older than six months. In general a woman in infertile only up to six months after childbirth, however this isn’t true for each and every woman.

3. And finally the most important thing to watch out for is that your menstruation cycle shouldn’t have resumed to normal. Once you start getting periods after child birth, then you cannot rely only on breastfeeding to work as a contraceptive. Although in most cases the menstrual cycles don’t come back before six months after child birth, in some women the cycles may return to normal even after four months of the delivery.

These are the three things you must keep in mind if you want to rely exclusively on breastfeeding as a birth control measure. And remember that even if one of these conditions is violated you must begin using contraceptives.

So when your child starts taking other foods besides breast milk, or your menstrual cycles return to normal or when your baby is more than six months old, you must begin using contraceptives to prevent child birth, or else you might find yourself in troubled waters with two infants in the house to be taken care of.